Digital cameras forum: Best camera to film live music for under 400-500$?

The thing is most large venues don't allow you to take camcorders and definitely not DSLRs so we have to play with what we've got. I completely agree with everything you said but I don't make the rules.

My Canon has a beautiful sound, comparable to the low-middle range of professional recording devices (mono, of course, so very low distortion), and it works great in low light (3.7x zoom). But I definitely need a better lens so I have to move on whether I like it or not.

I know the Sony DSC-HX9V does fare worse in low light and the sound is less rich than with my camera but there's very little testing I can do to know which one of the new range is the lesser evil, particularly with the sound. Nobody tells you that on the specs...

This is a video filmed with an HX9 just so get an audio of the very considerable quality you get. Sound is more muffled than with my 980 but, still...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgW5Gsq62z8

The audio from the HX9 suffers from overdriving the circuits.
The source (live) music is too loud for the position of the camera.
i.e. You are too close to the music source and the camera has no adjustment for this.

The distortion produces a muffled sound.
Since you cannot regulate the source, you must get further away from the source.

Another way to control this is to buy a digital camera that has a input for an external microphone.
If you get a "smart" microphone you can have some control over too-loud music. But such a microphone will cost over $200.

There is a digital camera (Panasonic ZS15) that was recently reviewed and gets good marks on video and sound.
The still pictures from the camera are exceptionally good. Low level lighting performance is better than the average for a camera in its price range:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/camera-reviews/panasonic/lumix-dmc-zs15/panasonic-lumix-dmc-zs15-review.html

..

I was trying to avoid checking the Lumix because it would be making the list even longer. I have a friend who has the superior to that, the ZS20, and it's good but it saturates very easily. The annoying thing is the microphone is different between them. While the ZS15 has a mono system, the ZS20 has stereo, which makes sense if you say the ZS15 has good sound (where can I find that review, by the way?). That's the annoying thing with these cameras. It's they keep changing the configuration and combining these things that look cool on the specs list but then don't improve or even worsen the output. It's ridiculous...

I wish I had a way of test driving the 3 of them. Because I know they're all going to be worse than mine but at least I could compare. Thanks for the suggestion though...

http://www.steves-digicams.com/camera-reviews/panasonic/lumix-dmc-zs15/panasonic-lumix-dmc-zs15-review.html